A Popular Collaborative Tool used by many in the district:


Chalkdust
  • We've Moved...
    Find us at the new home...
  • The gOS. Make your Business Administrator Happy with This One.
    gOS - Discover a good OS. via kwoutIt's been a while since I posted about an app or a tech topic, but this one was too good...I took one look at this the other day and thought immediately of the decrepit group of ThinkPads we have sitting around t...
  • Open Professional Development
    (a version of this is cross-posted at Tech Dossier)Welcome back to what is commonly referred to as the second half of the school year, but in reality unevenly splits our academic year into two sections; regardless, I hope everyone had a restful ho...
  • If you had your druthers
    If you could create a class, perhaps one that exists in the schools you are all talking about at Clay's post, what it would be structured like?I ask this for a very specific reason: we are creating new classes and we'd love to push the envelope a ...
  • Process Re-Design, Part II
    Among the other things that my Uncle Bill and I talked about was the need for everyone involved in changing processes within their organization to have a "territory," or in our case, some idea that you own that is yours undeniably. He spoke abou...
  • Process Re-Design, Part I
    I had a great Christmas. I realized a few things, saw my son explode with joy over the least likely gift, spent some quiet time with my wife, and had one of the most meaningful and perfectly timed conversations with my uncle.Everyone should have ...
  • How to Present
    If you have the time over the break, check out Scott Elias' slidecast below. This should be a prerequisite to every preservice teacher before they take their first job so they don't do as I did and repeat the presentation mistakes of the teachers...
  • What to do once you are there.
    Friday, at the very end of the day, I had the opportunity to work with a teacher, Carole Sobiechowski to help her set up her class blog for her Civics class. It was an appointment that was a long time coming, as both of us had rescheduled it seve...
  • Fun with Time-Lapse Photography
    Fun with Gawker and Time Lapse Photography from Patrick on Vimeo.We had our new teacher meeting for the month of December, which we spent podcasting about a lesson that they created over the last month.I see big possibilities with this, not just ...
  • Hard to Imagine, this Cyberbullying Stuff.
    We have been engaging in online collaborative work now in our district using Web 2.0 tools for over a year now, and the number of students and teachers blogging, using wikis, or creating screencast tutorials with their students keeps growing daily...


Some of the things we are seeing with Wikis:
  • lots of communication
  • students solving problems that we used to intervene and solve
  • more collaboration than we ever imagined.
  • similar problems to other group projects, but the manner in which they are solved is much different
  • more accessible to teachers because of email and discussion

Some things we need to work on:
  • technical issues
    • blank page of death
    • formats for documents
  • language and usage policies for email and discussion boards
  • not over-using this format.